Japanese Comfort Food

Wakasan is the one place in Los Angeles that reminds lotta_cox of Tokyo. “Not the Tokyo of Lost in Translation. But the Tokyo I know from strapping on walking shoes and walking from neighborhood to neighborhood from dawn ’til dusk several days in a row. The little streets in between the high streets, that twist and turn through residential areas… in these streets are tiny unpretentious restaurants that remind me very much of Wakasan.” And it’s delicious.

Wakasan offers you only one menu, the drinks menu, because the only food option is omakase for $35. The offerings, of course, vary from night to night. On one night, lotta_cox received 11 dishes, including “a lovely and light flavored” sardine with sesame seeds over daikon salad, a salad of two kinds of seaweed mixed with tiny mushrooms, sashimi, crab, and a fluffy, hot Japanese custard.

The second-best dish of the night: beef soup with green onions and huge chunks of ginger in miso broth, “hot and lovely” and “delicious personified,” says lotta_cox. But the hands-down favorite was a bowl of uni and salmon roe over rice.

Your editor, Thi N., adds that this place demonstrates the typical eerie Japanese facility with potato salad– and macaroni salad–type dishes.